Monetary Policy Communication Research Articles

Dictionary-based sentiment analysis of monetary policy communication: on the applicability of lexicons

AbstractIn this study, we discuss central bank communication sentiments assessed using different dictionaries. Policy communication by monetary authorities is considered an essential additional policy tool. Various text-mining techniques could evaluate its sentiment. Dictionary methods are a prominent example here because they offer simplicity and are a starting point for applying more elaborate methods. We decided to test four lexicons: generic, economic and financial and two domain-specific lexicons to conclude on their applicability to assess the sentiments of monetary releases and provide recommendations for their further application. This study surveys four lexicons qualitatively and conducts a few exercises: lexicon content comparison, performance tests for highly positive and negative messages, and statistical tests of dictionary alignment and correlation. The sample covers small open economies implementing inflation targeting. The study concludes that all investigated dictionaries could be used for detecting central bank intentions: they do not return contradictory results. The choice among them for a particular study depends on the study’s setup and goals—as presented in our recommendations

The clarity of monetary policy communication and financial market volatility in developing economies

This study investigates the effect of the clarity of monetary policy statements (MPSs) on financial market volatilities by employing linguistic analysis and a panel fixed effects estimator for a newly built dataset drawn from the MPSs of 21 developing countries. Our results show that MPS clarity, measured by complexity and readability indices, negatively affects foreign exchange rate volatility, a key policy variable in developing economies, suggesting that clear central bank communication can reduce financial market volatility. Given the low literacy levels in developing countries, their central banks should make an extra effort to write statements that are easy to comprehend.

ECB monetary policy communication events: Do they move euro area yields?

AbstractThis study aims to determine and compare the impact of four different types of European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy communication events on euro area sovereign yields on an intraday basis since 2014. Our paper distinguishes it from similar studies in that we analyze a broad range of ECB communication types. The results reveal that ECB decisions and press conferences have the most substantial intraday impact on normalized sovereign yields while the impact of speeches and accounts appears to be much weaker. Countries with the highest debt levels (such as Italy, Spain, and France) experienced the most robust changes in fiscal costs, while the period encompassing the economic shock induced by the Covid‐19 pandemic shows weaker effects.

Understanding Monetary Policy Communication in a Small and Open Economy Under an Exchange Rate Anchor: The Case of North Macedonia

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to provide insights into the readability, structure, and tone of monetary policy communication in the case of the National Bank of the Republic of North Macedonia (NBRNM), a small and open economy operating under an exchange rate anchor. The results indicate the NBRNM generally communicates with a neutral tone while its communication is complex in terms of syntax and structure. The dominant topic is inflation and financial markets, followed by monetary policy, economic growth, and the foreign exchange market. Further, topic proportions and tone are analyzed in relation to key macroeconomic indicators.

Language of Markets: Analysing Monetary Policy Communication and Financial Market Reactions in West Africa

Language of Markets: Analysing Monetary Policy Communication and Financial Market Reactions in West Africa

An Empirical Analysis of the Central Bank of China's Monetary Policy and the Impact of its Communications on Market Interest Rates, Liquidity and Credit

As one of the largest world's economies, China’s economy plays an important role at regional and global levels. In this context, with the fast opening steps of the Chinese economy to international markets, the Chinese Central Bank (PBC or PBOC) has adjusted its mechanisms to the needs of local and international economies. Chinese monetary policy is designed to keep prices and economic growth stable and to ensure the country’s economic development. The Chinese Central Bank has a significant influence over Chinese interest rates, interbank rates, and changes in liquidity and credit. The main goal of this research paper is to describe the role of the Chinese Central Bank in delivering Chinese monetary policy and its changes over the past few years. Our research paper is dedicated to verifying how the Chinese Central Bank's press releases are useful indicators for the future trend of market interest rates after constructing a numerical index representative of expansive or restrictive net signals contained in any of the PBC Communications examined. An empirical analysis over Chinese Monetary Policy Communications (Reports) is included in this research paper, presenting how the Central Bank of China is implementing its monetary policy in order to influence the development of its economic growth through its market interest rates, liquidity and credit movement.

Monetary Policy Frameworks and Communication in the Caucasus and Central Asia

Monetary Policy Frameworks and Communication in the Caucasus and Central Asia

New evidence from the monetary policy communication and inflation expectations nexus in Africa

Motivated by the dearth of evidence, we examine the impact of monetary policy communication on inflation expectations in Africa. Employing text-mining techniques to analyse the monetary policy statements of six African central banks, we compute a novel index of monetary policy communication (MPCI) using the extracted word counts, readability, sentiment and tone indicators. We provide new evidence of a positive and statistically significant impact of sentiments, tone and the MPCI on inflation expectations in Africa. Our results also reveal a rising influence of sentiments in anchoring expectations during the COVID-19 pandemic era. Our results are robust to alternative measures of inflation expectation and to global economic uncertainty. We recommend concise and lucid policy statements alongside statements with tone and policy decision consistency for anchoring inflation expectations. Furthermore, investors should carefully analyse and respond to signals from central bank communication, incorporating these insights into their investment strategies and risk management practices.

Research on the Measurement of Central Bank Communication Index and its Impact on the Macroeconomy

With the increasing size of financial assets and the complexity of monetary patterns, countries around the world are gradually becoming more transparent in their monetary policies, using central bank monetary policy communication as a new type of monetary policy instrument. To measure central bank communication more accurately, this paper proposes a dynamic topic model, LDA-BP, based on branching processes, to construct the central bank communication index. At the same time, this paper does four things: it uses the constructed communication index as a proxy variable for the new monetary policy instrument; it builds a TVP-FAVAR model that can extract potential macroeconomic information from many variables, and its time-varying nature can better reflect the dynamic regulatory effect of monetary policy; it constructs a three-dimensional impulse response diagram; and it conducts a systematic analysis of macroeconomic impact. The experimental results of demonstrate its effectiveness on central bank monetary policy communication, as it captures timely information about conventional monetary policy instruments and immediately responds to changes in interest rates and money supply. All three monetary policy instruments are effective in smoothing output volatility, with monetary policy communication having a longer-term impact on the macroeconomy.

Monetary policy communication and inflation expectations: New evidence about tone and readability

We contribute new empirical evidence on monetary policy communication and inflation expectations by firms. First, we construct a new indicator of the perceived tone of monetary policy communication that complements traditional indicators of the effective tone. Both have the expected negative sign and are statistically significant in panel data regressions with firms’ inflation expectations as the dependent variable, suggesting that communication has an important effect over inflation expectations. We also compute readability and perspicuity indicators of the communications. Better readability of monetary policy communication reinforces the effect of the tone. Impact is larger when combined with the indicator of effective tone, suggesting that readability is an important component in monetary policy communication.

Monetary Policy Communication: Perspectives from Former Policymakers at the ECB

AbstractA survey on monetary policy communication among former members of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) reveals that enhancing credibility and trust is viewed as the most important objective of communication. Respondents judge communication with financial markets and experts as adequate, but see room for improvement in communicating with the public. The central bank objective is seen as the most important topic. Several respondents perceived the ECB's inflation aim of “below, but close to, 2%” that was in place at the time as ambiguous and in need of clarification. Overall, there is broad consensus on various communication issues.

ECB monetary communications: Market fragmentation at stake

We provide evidence that monetary policy in the Euro Area can unintentionally produce market fragmentation risk. This risk is estimated from changes in long-term bond yields around ECB monetary policy communications between 2002 and 2021. These shocks cause longer-term bond yields in periphery countries to rise significantly, which ultimately hurts their economies. The time series of these shocks are publicly available.

Is the People's Bank of China consistent in words and deeds?

The People's Bank of China (PBC) now frequently uses communication as a policy tool. Whether its words are consistent with its deeds is important for the public to understand the PBC's complex behavior. In this paper, we employ a supervised learning model to construct monetary policy (MP) and economic outlook (EC) communication indices based on the outlook section of quarterly China Monetary Policy Reports (MPRs). We find that the PBC not only adjusts its interventions according to the corresponding economic situation, but also takes into account the information released in the previous outlook section, which indicates its consistency in words and deeds. Using a time-varying parameter model, we further find that the PBC's consistency of words and deeds has made progress over time. The PBC tends to be more consistent in words and deeds under higher uncertainty, and the improvement of such consistency can significantly decrease disagreement about inflation expectations. An additional analysis shows that the full text of MPRs can help predict future monetary policies on a longer time horizon.

New Evidence from the Monetary Policy Communication and Inflation Expectations Nexus in Africa

New Evidence from the Monetary Policy Communication and Inflation Expectations Nexus in Africa

Predictable Errors in Monetary Policy Communications and Decisions

Predictable Errors in Monetary Policy Communications and Decisions

New Evidence from the Monetary Policy Communication and Inflation Expectations Nexus in Africa

New Evidence from the Monetary Policy Communication and Inflation Expectations Nexus in Africa

Monetary Policy Communication during Nigeria’s 2016 Economic Recession: Insights from a Text Mining Analysis

Monetary Policy Communication during Nigeria’s 2016 Economic Recession: Insights from a Text Mining Analysis

Emotion in Euro Area Monetary Policy Communication and Bond Yields: The Draghi Era

Emotion in Euro Area Monetary Policy Communication and Bond Yields: The Draghi Era

Regulatory Institutions and National Economic Development in Nigeria

The financial sector is the epicenter of productive activity of an economy as it performs the vital role of financial intermediation, provider of payment services and the arbiter of monetary policy communication and implementation. Therefore, the objective of the study is to examine the effect of CBN as a regulatory institution on national economic development in Nigeria. The study used ex-post facto research design and the study covered a period of ten years (2011 – 2020). The study employed ordinary least square (OLS) method of estimation to establish the importance of the independent variables on the dependent’s variables. The findings revealed that Monetary policy Rate (MPR) has insignificant positive (202.2958/0.2296 ˃ 0.05) effect on the National Economic Development in Nigeria; Credit to Private Sector (CPS) has insignificant negative (-208.6998/0.1319 ˃ 0.05) effect on the National Economic Development in Nigeria; Liquidity Ratio (LQR) has significant negative (-57.09290/0.0503 = 0.05) effect liquidity ratio on the National Economic Development in Nigeria; and Interest rate (INT) has insignificant negative (-274.8069/0.1717 ˃ 0.05) effect liquidity ratio on the National Economic Development in Nigeria. The study concluded that the CBN current policies has been anti-people and over the years not having significant effect on economic development in Nigeria. The study recommended among other things that CBN should critically re-examines its regulatory policies to focus more on visionary policies that would cause the financial deepening indicators, monetary policy rate and exchange rate to positively and significantly engender development of the financial system. Central Bank of Nigeria should check mate their policy rates to ensure the prevention of inflation in the economy.

Are monetary policy shocks causal to bank health? Evidence from the euro area

Despite considerable efforts of the European Central Bank (ECB) to support bank intermediation after the 2008 financial crisis, the recovery of euro area banks remained incomplete. Although many studies indicate that central banks can influence the stock prices of firms through their policy actions and communication, a knowledge gap exists as to whether the ECB's monetary policy can influence bank health. Through a high-frequency identification approach, this study reveals that the causal effect of conventional monetary policy action and communication by the ECB on bank stock prices differed over time, whereas its influence on bank financing costs was robust. This study provides new evidence showing that information effects related to policy easing surprises in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis hampered the ECB efforts to improve bank health and that its Odyssean communication signals (related to forward-looking announcements of policy easing) supported bank health during this phase. Local projections suggest that the response of banks to monetary policy shocks displayed some persistence, where ECB policy surprises and communications that shifted up (down) the yield curve were normally positive (negative) for bank health. The findings solicit a new perspective when assessing the influence of the ECB's monetary policy measures on euro area banks.